The Pandemic Blog

Note from Tom: FeedBurner, which has been sending out the emails with my blog posts, will stop doing this in July. I have engaged  Follow.It  to take over that immediately. If you are currently receiving the FeedBurner emails, your address has been transferred to Follow It. And if you’re not receiving emails now, you can remedy that problem by clicking on the menu icon in the top left of this post. I’m going to leave the FeedBurner feed active for a few more days, so you should receive both feeds of this post. If you received the FeedBurner feed for this post but you didn’t also receive the Follow.It feed (you can identify that from the email address it comes from), please drop me an email and I’ll add you to Follow.It. In theory, this shouldn’t happen, but one never knows… I’m sorry that it’s been two weeks since I’ve posted – got too busy in my day job. Fortunately, the numbers didn’t wait for me to write a post, and they’ve kept declining all along. The last time we had “only”

Note from Tom: FeedBurner, which has been sending out the emails with my blog posts, will stop doing this in July. I have engaged  Follow.It  to take over that immediately. If you are currently receiving the FeedBurner emails, your address has been transferred to Follow It. And if you’re not receiving emails now, you can remedy that problem by clicking on the menu icon in the top left of the main page of this blog. I’m going to leave the FeedBurner feed active for a few more days, so you should receive both feeds of this post. If you received the FeedBurner feed for this post but you didn’t also receive the Follow.It feed, please drop me an email and I’ll add you to Follow.It. In theory, this shouldn’t happen, but one never knows…   I was able to look at new US Covid cases and new deaths for both the last week and the month of May. If last week had been the end of the month, I would have said May was pretty disappointing. Yes, daily new cases (about 33,000) were about half of the

This past week saw an increase in the 7-day rates of change in both Covid cases and deaths in the US. Cases increased by .6% vs. .5% the previous week. And deaths increased by .9% vs. .7% the previous week. Of course, one week doesn’t in itself mean a change in direction, but at the least this shows that we’re unlikely to come anywhere close to zero cases in the near term – and perhaps ever. And that we need to prepare to take a booster vaccine shot in the early fall. I heard on NPR just now that the vaccine manufacturers are now making boosters that address the new variants – although new variants (all more transmissible than earlier ones) are arriving with great regularity now. Why is this happening? It’s simple: In countries with big current case numbers, the virus mutates much more quickly, and variants that are more transmissible quickly gain the upper hand (Iran, Russia, Malaysia and Nepal now lead the world in absolute numbers of new cases. India was number 13 in daily new c